Important Amazon Weekly News #18

What happened
According to Adobe, 2025 was the most successful holiday shopping season ever recorded. Cyber Monday reaffirmed its position as the biggest day in e-commerce, while Black Friday also saw strong growth — $11.8 billion in sales (+9.1%). During the peak hours between 8:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m., shoppers spent an astonishing $16 million per minute. Over half of all purchases came from electronics, apparel, and home goods.

Why it matters
Beyond record numbers, Adobe’s data highlights a structural shift in shopper behavior. Traffic generated by AI-powered tools — including search assistants and chatbots — skyrocketed: up 805% on Black Friday and 670% on Cyber Monday year over year. This AI-driven traffic also converted 38% better than other sources.
Notably, clicks from ChatGPT to retailer websites grew by 28%, with Amazon capturing 54% of that traffic.

At the same time, social commerce exploded, with Cyber Week sales via social media up 56.5%, and TikTok alone driving $500 million in U.S. revenue over the weekend.

What it means for Amazon sellers
Amazon now stands at the intersection of two megatrends — AI and social discovery. The platform continues to invest heavily in both:

• Over 1.3 million sellers are already using AI-powered content generation for product listings.

• The updated Amazon Connect AI system analyzes customer behavior and personalizes interactions at scale.

For sellers, this marks a fundamental shift: traffic is increasingly driven by recommendations — both human (from social platforms) and algorithmic (from AI agents). To stay visible, sellers must focus on high-quality listings, authentic reviews, short-form videos, and AI-friendly optimization that helps products surface in these emerging recommendation channels.

What happened
On October 20, 2025, the AWS US-EAST-1 region experienced a massive failure lasting up to 15 hours (Cisco ThousandEyes). The outage took down dozens of major platforms — from Snapchat and Reddit to large e-commerce operations.

A few weeks later, AWS and Google Cloud revealed Interconnect, a joint solution designed to provide a direct, secure bridge between the two cloud ecosystems. While no launch date has been announced, the service promises:

• 4× redundancy capacity,

• instant failover,

• and continuous workload shifting between clouds.

The companies describe Interconnect as the foundation of an “internet without outages” — infrastructure where business operations continue even if one provider goes down entirely.

Why it matters
The October incident exposed the vulnerability of global cloud infrastructure — particularly for businesses whose sales, logistics, and data pipelines rely on AWS.

According to Yahoo Tech, the initiative is partly Amazon’s response to declining enterprise confidence, especially within e-commerce and SaaS sectors. With Interconnect, enterprise clients (including Amazon brands and marketplace sellers) will be able to distribute critical workloads across both clouds and maintain uninterrupted access to data and orders.

AWS and Google claim Interconnect will offer:

• Private connectivity without touching the public internet;

• Up to 800 Gbps throughput;

• Automatic traffic routing and real-time load balancing.

What it means for Amazon sellers
For Amazon sellers, the alliance promises greater platform stability. Nearly everything sellers rely on — fulfillment systems, analytics dashboards, advertising services, Seller Central reporting — runs on AWS. A multi-cloud architecture means lower risk of losing access to orders, ad campaigns, or performance data during outages.

What happened
One seller shared a case where a customer submitted AI-generated “damage photos” and demanded a returnless refund. When the seller refused, the buyer escalated the issue — and the seller ended up receiving an account warning.

Dozens of sellers joined the discussion with similar stories, describing:

• Repetitive, AI-generated complaint messages;

• Demands for returnless refunds;

• Attempts to extract money directly from sellers;

• Threats to “report you to Amazon” if compensation is denied.

As one forum member put it: “We’re forced to stay silent while being scammed, because defending ourselves can get us penalized.”

Why it matters
Sellers say AI has made fraud easy, scalable, and extremely hard to challenge — and Amazon’s current review systems are struggling to keep up.

Key pain points include:

• No way to block suspicious buyers;

• Even obvious forgeries often go unflagged;

• Customer complaints outweigh seller evidence;

• A stern tone in messages can trigger a warning;

• Auto-approved refunds and the updated returnless refund policy often resolve disputes in favor of buyers without seller involvement.

The result is a growing sense of vulnerability: both financially and reputationally, sellers feel exposed.

What sellers recommend
Experienced community members suggest staying strictly procedural and fully documented:

• Always require a physical return — do not accept photos as sole proof;

• Log every incident under Buyer Abuse;

• File a SAFE-T claim if a returnless refund is issued unfairly;

• Communicate calmly — emotional responses can trigger violations;

• FBA sellers should rely on Amazon’s decisions but still keep thorough records.